Tom Wolfe wrote a really beautiful essay called “The Secret Vice” about this in 1966. It was published in the New York Herald Tribune. He talks about how men would rather be seen with a pornography magazine in public than a clothing catalog. I think he’s exaggerating to some degree, but he’s actually not that far off. It is true that the dandy is often bucking some convention of the day, if only because their dress tends to be, if not extravagant, at least unusual or noticeable.
Charles Baudelaire famously wrote that the dandy is the last flicker of decadence at a time of basically declining empire. If you go to Anderson’s book, it takes the story away from the idea of these really eccentric, rich figures and talks about how men of more modest means, some even poorer, have used clothes to express this decadence.
Dennis M. Hogan: Part of what you argue often is that clothing is a language. And part of what language allows you to do is to take units of meaning and to recombine them — to combine them in ways that could be very conventional, but also to combine them in ways that could be unexpected or original. The only real mistake is to not really know how the language works. Dandies know how the language works, and they’re very committed to innovating within it.
Derek Guy: Sometimes people ask me about how fashion trends arise. Noam Chomsky is known for being a leftist critic, but he’s actually, professionally, a linguist. He’s famous for the phrase “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but makes no sense. When you think of outfits as language, that you combine them using existing words and put them in the correct order to express something — that you’re rugged or refined or whatever it is — that is what makes an outfit good.
The dandy, or someone who’s innovating in some way, is usually someone with some type of cultural capital. When you think of slang, for example, how does slang come about? When you think of how new fashions get created and how people take existing words and flip them in new ways, you can think of clothes as similar to language, in that someone with cultural capital took something existing and turned it into something else, to mean something else. Someone takes an existing style — often like a work garment, like work boots or a work jacket — and flips it to mean something else. And since they have cultural capital, the style is now considered cool, and it gets put into the mainstream through some other medium, like a movie or music video.